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Mister Rogers and Philosophy

The movie starring Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, is scheduled for release October 2019 (not a bio of Rogers nor a recreation of the show, the movie is a fictional story involving Rogers and the show)
The book, The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King released in September 2018
In March 2018, there was a PBS prime time special on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, to celebrate its fifty-year anniversary.

The Good Place and Philosophy

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The Good Place is a fantasy-comedy TV show about the afterlife. Eleanor dies and finds herself in the Good Place, which she understands must be mistake, since she has been anything but good. In the surprise twist ending to Season One, it is revealed that this is really the Bad Place, but the demon who planned it was frustrated, because the characters didn’t torture each other mentally as planned, but managed to learn how to live together. In ,i>The Good Place and Philosophy[/i], twenty-one philosophers analyze different aspects of the ethical and metaphysical issues raised in the show, including: ● Indefinitely long punishment can only be justified as a method of ultimately improving vicious characters, not as retribution. ● Can individuals retain their identity after hundreds of reboots? ● Comparing Hinduism with The Good Place, we can conclude that Hinduism gets things five percent correct. ● Looking at all the events in the show, it follows that humans don’t have free will, and so people are being punished and rewarded unjustly. ● Is it a problem that the show depicts torture as hilarious? This problem can be resolved by considering the limited perspective of humans, compared with the eternal perspective of the demons. ● The Good Place implies that even demons can develop morally. ● The only way to explain how the characters remain the same people after death is to suppose that their actual bodies are transported to the afterlife. ● Since Chidi knows all the moral theories but can never decide what to do, it must follow that there is something missing in all these theories. ● The show depicts an afterlife which is bureaucratic, therefore unchangeable, therefore deeply unjust. ● Eleanor acts on instinct, without thinking, whereas Chidi tries to think everything through and never gets around to acting; together these two characters can truly act morally. ● The Good Place shows us that authenticity means living for others. ● The Good Place is based on Sartre’s play No Exit , with its famous line “Hell is other people,” but in fact both No Exit and The Good Place inform us that human relationships can redeem us. ● In The Good Place , everything the humans do is impermanent since it can be rebooted, so humans cannot accomplish anything good. ● Kant’s moral precepts are supposed to be universal, but The Good Place shows us it can be right to lie to demons. ● The show raises the question whether we can ever be good except by being part of a virtuous community.

The Handmaid's Tale and Philosophy

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–"A Handmaid's Tale" won the 2018 Golden Globe for Best TV Series in the Drama category and star Elisabeth Moss won for Best Actress in a TV Drama –Hulu's «A Handmaid's Tale» is the first streaming series to win an Emmy for Best Drama. –The Washington Post named this series one of the Best TV Shows of 2017

Amy Schumer and Philosophy

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Schumer's new book, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, has sold over 25,000 copies in hardback.

The Twilight Zone and Philosophy

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A third revival of the Twilight Zone series is being produced by Jordan Peele for CBS All Access.

Twin Peaks and Philosophy

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Twin Peaks has such hardcore fans that it returned to television for a third season after an unprecedented 25 years, with the original creators and many of the same cast members. Twin Peaks: The Return– aired in 2017 to rave reviews, and speculation about further seasons.

1984 and Philosophy

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Sales of the Orwell novel, 1984 , have spiked following Trump's election, with U.S. sales in 2017 to date exceeding 400,000 Interest in dystopian fiction is at an all-time high, as readers struggle to make sense of what is happening to their society and culture Books about Orwell, such as Churchhill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom (2017), have also been selling well. This one has sold over 30,000 copies in hardcover since its release in May 2017

Scott Adams and Philosophy

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As cartoonist, author, public speaker, blogger, and periscoper, Scott Adams has had best-sellers in several different fields: his Dilbert cartoons, his meditations on the philosophy of Dilbert, his works on how to achieve success in business and all other areas of life, his two remarkable books on religion, and now his controversial work on political persuasion. Adams’s two most recent best-sellers are How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (2014) and Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter (2017). Adams predicted Donald Trump’s election victory (on August 13th 2016) and has explained then and more recently how Trump operates as a Master Persuader, using “weapons-grade” persuasive techniques to defeat his opponents and often to stay several moves ahead of them. Adams has provocative ideas in many areas, for example his outrageous claim that 30 percent of the population have absolutely no sense of humor, and take their cue from conventional opinion in deciding whether something is a joke, since they have no way of deciding this for themselves. In Scott Adams and Philosophy, an elite cadre of people who think for a living put Scott Adams’s ideas under scrutiny. Every aspect of Adams’s fascinating and infuriating system of ideas is explained and tested. Among the key topics:<ul>

<li>Does humor inform us about reality?
<li>Do religious extremists know something the rest of us don’t?
<li>What are facts and how can they not matter?
<li>What happens when confirmation bias meets cognitive dissonance?
<li>How can we tell whether President Trump is a genius or just dumb-lucky?
<li>Does the Dilbert philosophy discourage the struggle for better workplace conditions?
<li>How sound is Adams’s claim that “systems” thinking beats goal-directed thinking?
<li>Does Dilbert exhibit a Nietzschean or a Kierkegaardian sense of life? Or is it Sisyphian in Camus’s sense?
<li>Can truth be over-rated?
<li>“The political side that is out of power is the side that hallucinates the most.”
<li>If there’s a serious chance we’re living in a Matrix-type simulation, how should we change our behavior?
<li>Are most public policy issues just too complex and technical for most people to have an opinion about?
<li>In politics, says Adams, it’s as if different people watch the same movie at the same time, some thinking it’s a romantic comedy and others thinking it’s a horror picture. How is that possible?
<li>Does logic play any part in persuasion?</li></ul>

Iron Man vs. Captain America and Philosophy

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Iron Man or Captain America? Which one is superior—as a hero, as a role model, or as a personification of American virtue? Philosophers who take different sides come together in Iron Man versus Captain America to debate these issues and arrive at a deeper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of these iconic characters. The discussion ranges over politics, religion, ethics, psychology, and metaphysics. John Altmann argues that Captain America’s thoughtful patriotism, is superior to Iron Man’s individualist-cosmopolitanism. Matthew William Brake also votes for Cap, maintaining that it’s his ability to believe in the impossible that makes him a hero, and in the end, he is vindicated. Cole Bowman investigates the nature of friendship within the Avengers team, focusing predominantly on the political and social implications of each side of the Civil War as the Avengers are forced to choose between Stark and Rogers. According to Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, Cap is the better friend, but that doesn’t make him the winner! Aron Ericson’s chapter tracks our heroes’ journeys in the movies, culminating with Civil War, where the original attitudes of Tony (trusts only himself) and Steve (trusts “the system”) are inverted. Corey Horn’s chapter focuses on one of the many tensions between the sides of Iron Man and Captain America—the side of Security (Iron Man) versus Liberty (Cap). But Maxwell Henderson contends that if we dig deeper into the true heart of the Marvel Civil War, it isn’t really about security or privacy but more about utilitarianism—what’s best for everybody. Henderson explains why Iron Man was wrong about what was best for everybody and discloses what the philosopher Derek Parfit has to say about evaluating society from this perspective. Daniel Malloy explains that while both Captain America and Iron Man have faced setbacks, only Iron Man has failed at being a hero—and that makes him the better hero! In his other chapter, Malloy shows that where Iron Man trusts technology and systems, Captain America trusts people. Jacob Thomas May explores loss from the two heroes’ points of view and explains why the more tragic losses suffered by Stark clearly make him the better hero and the better person. Louis Melancon unpacks how Captain America and Iron Man each embodies key facets of America attempts to wage wars: through attrition and the prophylactic of technology; neither satisfactorily resolves conflict and the cycle of violence continues. Clara Nisley tests Captain America and Iron Man’s moral obligations to the Avengers and their shared relationship, establishing Captain America’s associative obligations that do not extend to the arbitration and protection of humans that Iron Man advocates. Fernando Pagnoni Berns considers that while Iron Man is too much attached to his time (and the thinking that comes with it), Captain America embraces-historical values, and thinks that there are such things as intrinsic human dignity and rights—an ethical imperative. Christophe Porot claims that the true difference between Captain America and Iron Man stems from the different ways they extend their minds. Cap extends his mind socially while Stark extends his through technology. Heidi Samuelson argues that the true American spirit isn't standing up to bullies, but comes out of the self-interested traditions of liberal capitalism, which is why billionaire, former-arms-industry-giant Tony Stark is ultimately a more appropriate American symbol than Steve Rogers. By contrast, Jeffrey Ewing shows that the core of Captain America: Civil War centers on the challenge superpowers impose on state sovereignty (and the monopoly of coercion it implies). Nicol Smith finds that Cap and Shell-Head’s clash during the Civil War does not necessarily boil down to the issue of freedom vs. regulation but rather stems from the likelihood that both these iconic heroes are political and ideological wannabe supreme rules or “Leviathans.” Craig Van Pelt reconstructs a debate between Captain America and Iron Man about whether robots can ever have objective moral values, because human bias may influence the design and programming. James Holt looks into the nature of God within Captain America’s world and how much this draws on the “previous life” of Captain Steve Rogers. Holt’s inquiry focuses on the God of Moses in the burning bush, as contrasted with David Hume’s understanding of religion. Gerald Browning examines our two heroes in a comparison with the Greek gods Hephaestus and Hercules. Christopher Ketcham supposes that, with the yellow bustard wreaking havoc on Earth, God asks Thomas Aquinas to use his logical process from Summa Theologica to figure which one of the two superheroes would be better at fixing an economic meltdown, and which one would be better at preventing a war. Rob Luzecky and Charlene Elsby argue that gods cannot be heroes, and therefore that the god-like members of the Avengers (Iron Man, with a god’s intelligence; Thor, with a god’s strength, and the Hulk, with a god’s wrath) are not true heroes in the same sense as Captain America. Cap is like Albert Camus’s Sisyphus, heroic in the way that he rallies against abstract entities like the gods and the government.

Jimi Hendrix and Philosophy

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Growing out of the Jimi Hendrix Electric Guitar Festivals of the 1990s, the continually expanding Experience Hendrix Tour is now an annual nationwide event, in which leading rock and blues artists pay tribute to Hendrix, with its most ambitious itinerary and biggest impact yet in Spring 2017.
2017 is the fiftieth anniversary of Hendrix’s breakthrough as an intercontinental popular artist, and of the release of the first album of the Jim Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced?

The Jimi Hendrix live performance CD Machine Gun: The Fillmore East First Show (recorded 12/31/69) was released in September 2016, received rave reviews, and reached 66 in the Billboard 200, with subsequent solid sales.